15 November 2008

[15] sleeping arrangements

After several unsuccessful attempts to refill my air mattress, I resigned myself to the fact that it had a hole in it. Somewhere. Now, I could try to find this hole, but an air mattress is a pretty large inflatable object, as I told the guy at Aer0bed when I called,

"I think it has a hole in it, but I don't have a swimming pool to dunk it into."

"What we suggest you do," he told me, "is fill a spray bottle with water and a little dish soap, and spray it on the mattress, one section at a time, and then press gently on that section to see if anything bubbles out from the mattress."

... (Well! Isn't THAT helpful? Isn't that how you want to spend your evening?)

"I don't think I have room for that, either." I said. (My apartment is a little bit bigger than a standard hotel room. The kind with two beds, only I have just one, which leaves room for the kitchen.)

"Well," he said, sounding annoyed, "I guess you'll have to send us a copy of your receipt then, to show that you actually did buy it within the last year, and then I can authorize a return."

Why yes, that would be very nice, considering that I did nothing to this mattress between the night it was full and the day it started leaking. There is no way it could have been punctured. It just started seeping, as far as I can tell. Shouldn't it last more than a year? I bought the most expensive one! I hate replacing things out that can continue to be useful, but for that price, this air mattress seems like something that should last more than a year. It just does.

In addition to the eventual replacement of the warrantied air mattress (should they decide to honor the warranty - that phone call did not sound encouraging), I have inherited a mattress from S.'s parents. Now I can sleep in a real bed, for the first time in this apartment. For the last week or so, I've been sleeping on my 1kea couch that flips out into a bed. It's not too terribly uncomfortable, but it does make the apartment veeery crowded, and it's oddly hot. I wake up sweaty several times a night. I guess this is the penalty one pays for a foam mattress without a mattress pad.

(Side note: when I was very little after we first moved to Liberia, I used to sleep on a foam mattress all the time. To hear my parents tell it, they got very tired of picking up a dripping-wet-with-sweat baby every morning, so they bought water beds when we came home on furlough. I spent most of my childhood sleeping in a water bed, which was the perfect antidote to the heat in Liberia. When I had malaria, though, even that was not cool enough. I remember lying flat on the cement floor, trying to soak up the cool as my body burned with fever.)

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